Texas may be starting to open up, Texas may be starting to open up, but don’t expect that to impact the Stars getting back on the ice. They’ll have to wait for NHL approval.

“The league’s made it very clear that they’re not going to let three or four teams be able to open up their rinks and the other teams can’t,” Stars general manager Jim Nill said. “That wouldn’t be fair, or a level playing field, I guess is the way to put it. Right now, it doesn’t change anything.”

On Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that the state’s stay-at-home order would expire Thursday, allowing stores, restaurants, malls and movie theaters to open with 25% capacity. Gyms (Nill wasn’t sure if the team’s practice facility in Frisco was deemed a gym) would not be allowed to open until mid-May at the earliest, Abbott said.

Still, the announcement makes the Stars one of the first teams in a state beginning to reopen. Colorado was the other state with an NHL team that had a stay-at-home order expire before Texas. Tennessee, Arizona, Florida and Nevada all have orders set to expire Thursday as well.

The NHL still has mandated a quarantine for team personnel through Thursday.

“With opening up, it doesn’t change it drastically unless we get a larger number of states doing it,” Nill said. “Then that might change things, but for now, we’re still under a quarantine.”

In theory, when state, county or city officials around the league decide to open facilities, it could happen before players return to the city they play in. For example, many Stars players, including John Klingberg, Esa Lindell, Miro Heiskanen, Denis Gurianov, Roope Hintz and Anton Khudobin are home in Europe.

“If we get a call in two weeks and the league says ‘Five guys are allowed to come in,’ I know we’ve got eight to 10 guys still here in Dallas, we’d let five guys go in,” Nill said. “But until we get that clearance by the league, we’re not allowed to open up our training facilities.”

When facilities open, there will likely be protocol from the league that follows it. Testing before entering the facility or wearing masks while inside it are possibilities.

“Whatever it is, that protocol will be set up for us,” Nill said. “That’ll be under the guidance of the medical community.”

The NHL has floated a couple of unorthodox plans: one to host games in centralized cities with about eight teams in a city, and another to host the draft in June before the potential conclusion of the season.

Dallas has been reported to be a potential host city — with the state’s reopening timeline, ease of travel to and from, and infrastructure with eight practice rinks that the Stars operate — but those decisions have been handled at the league level instead of the team level.

As far as an early draft, Nill said he was flexible but would prefer a draft after the season given all the unknown moving parts typically involved with a draft day.

“The No. 1 part of the draft is drafting the next group of best players in the world, but there’s a lot of other business that goes with it,” Nill said. “I think it’s hard to do those parts of the business until you’ve had an end to the regular season and the playoffs. That’s my only concern, it’s a concern of the whole league is how do we get through that? There’s trades that are made at the draft. The draft is really the start of when you build your team for next season. How can you do that when you haven’t finished the season, haven’t had the playoffs? There are draft picks involved contingent on how teams do in the playoffs and how teams finish, whether they make the playoffs.”

Nill said the Stars’ scouting department has continued to watch videos of draft prospects to build their draft board.

“But there are no perfect scenarios,” Nill said. “We’re in a new world. If the league thinks it’s better to do it in June, we’ll have to do it in June, and we’ll live with that decision.”

Matthew DeFranks. Matt covers the Stars for SportsDay, and previously covered the Florida Panthers for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. He's also covered college football, the Miami Marlins, the Kansas City Royals and the Los Angeles Angels for a variety of outlets. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame.